'Gosford Park' screenwriter bewilders peers

Bob Balaban and Jeremy Northam star in "Gosford Park," written by a genuine member of the British aristrocracy, Julian Fellowes.

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) — Rookie British screen writer Julian Fellowes may be walking the red carpets of Hollywood these days, but to his aristocratic friends back in England's stately homes, he remains an object of polite bewilderment.

Which is precisely the social paradox that made Fellowes the risky but perfect candidate to pen maverick U.S. director Robert Altman's award-winning "Gosford Park," a satire on the British class system.

"As you know," said Fellowes, who has earned two top awards for his "Gosford Park" screenplay, "no Englishman is free from the baggage of class."

"In one way, it was a wonderful opportunity for me, not exactly to get my own back, but I know these people and I did have certain things I wanted to say," Fellowes told Reuters in an interview.

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Fellowes, a jovial 52 year-old, needed no introduction to the rarefied world of shooting parties, English country mansions and armies of servants who populate "Gosford Park."

The product of an elite British boarding school and Cambridge University, he had aristocratic pedigree even before marrying Emma Kitchener — great great niece of British military hero Lord Kitchener and now lady in waiting to Princess Michael of Kent, whose husband is a cousin of Queen Elizabeth.

But Fellowes astounded his social set by deciding in his 20s to be an actor. Now, after years of being what he calls "a jolly television actor who shows up in this, that or the other" he has the lead in the popular BBC television series "Monarch of the Glen."

"I grew up with these people where my career was a joke. When I became an actor and left Cambridge to go to drama school, my parents were to be pitied. They had spent all this money on my education and I was just throwing it away," he said.

"The idea that this was a serious way of spending the rest of your life, in entertainment ... it wasn't that they were hostile, they were just bewildered. It was as if I had said I was going to be a mole catcher," he chuckled.

"Just recently I was asked to a weekend shooting party that clashed with the premiere of my own movie," he continued. "They said 'Can't you get out of it?' The thought that anything should take precedence over a shooting weekend!"

Who cares whodunit?

In the 1990s, Fellowes turned to scriptwriting, adapting and producing two classic novels for the BBC and then trying his hand at feature movie screenplays — none of which had been made — before he was approached by American actor-producer Bob Balaban, with whom he had worked before, and Altman.

Balaban and Altman had conceived the idea of turning the 1930s English country house upstairs/downstairs murder mystery story on its head, to make the movie not so much a whodunit, but a who cares whodunit.

"What Altman has is the clean eye of an anthropologist. He just was making a film about an alien tribe and he wanted to get the details right," Fellowes said. "That was what I had that other people didn't have, and that was my lucky break.

"I have much to be grateful for. Bob Altman can have one of my kidneys whenever he needs it," he added.

Fellowes produced a tight, witty script in which, despite much on-set rewriting, hardly a word is wasted. Set in 1932, it carries some 40 characters and 25 story lines that divide audience sympathies between the leisured characters upstairs and their harried maids, cooks and valets below.

The screenplay is brought to life by a cast that reads like the who's-who of British stage and screen, including Alan Bates, Helen Mirren, Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas, Derek Jacobi, Stephen Fry and Emily Watson.

The movie is yet to be released in England but Fellowes hopes his own ambivalence about the social structure between the world wars as seen in "Gosford Park" will resonate with audiences.

"Some aspects of it (the old system) seem attractive and make one secure, and other aspects seem ludicrous and intolerable and hideously unjust. It's all mixed in. I hope that's what you come away from the film with," he said.

A 'pretty good treat'

Fellowes said that when "Gosford Park" was shown at the London Film Festival in November "my left-wing friend thought he'd seen a passionate indictment of a hideous injustice, and my mother-in-law thought she had seen a lovely nostalgic vision of the England of her youth. I thought great, we have pulled it off."

For Fellowes, who was on set every day during shooting, "the mere fact of seeing your jokes coming out of the lips of practically every famous British actor you have ever heard of" proved a "pretty good treat," he said.

But more treats were to come: best screenplay awards from both the New York Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics, a Golden Globe nomination. And the awards season has only just started.

"The whole thing is very dreamlike ... It's all been very extraordinary. You feel you have gone through the looking glass into another reality. I feel I am in a great adventure," said Fellowes.

Fellowes is excited by the success of Gosford Park but is philosophical about the future, with more screenplays lined up, some of them period pieces and others branching out into modern romance and family drama.

"If you have your big break when you are very young, it is easy to think you are part of God's chosen people. If you don't get your real crack of the whip until you are 50 like me, you are a fool if you are automatically confident that it will continue at the same pitch.

"No career lasts forever. You have a voice that is the right voice for a time and I think it is your job to enjoy it to the max, get as many laughs out of that period as possible, and not weep when it is over.

"But of course," he adds drily, "if everything goes wrong, my friends will be thrilled."

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